Contents:
This article is about effective offensive strategy not needing threat to precede it.
Intimidation is often misunderstood in its utilization. Rather than remaining a passive consequence of skilled performance and focus, intimidation is activated as a planned and direct offensive tactic by the unskilled and unserious.
The psychological factors behind counterproductively employing intimidation as a tactic are acute and difficult to map. It seems that those who seek to control the effect of threat, intimidation, and fear seem to make short-term calculations which arguably hurt their strategic cause.
Below are reasons why intimidation should be left to foster organically. When inflicting damage to any defensive effort is a priority, being non-threatening plays to the offense’s advantage.
Threat Unveils Offensive Intent
Those who’ve gone through painful breakups learned of the capacity for those who are close to cause pain. Significant others who’ve attained knowledge of vulnerabilities always have the option to attack those vulnerabilities should they so choose. Close relationships turning sour thereby sets the stage for devastating blows to be delivered.
Attaining knowledge and command of a target’s vulnerabilities involves getting close or observing that entity with its guard down. One can either establish themselves as a friendly entity and get close, or can anonymously observe the target from a distance when that target’s guard is down.
No approach of gathering information on a target’s vulnerabilities in preparation for attack is aided by intimidating that target. Along the same lines, leading with threats and intimidation ensures the execution of an offensive plan is more difficult than it needs to be.
Threat and intimidation allows a target to see, understand, and prevent an attack. The more surprising an initial blow is, the more success an offensive strategy will see. Surprise in warfare is a simple concept that can be studied to no end with its effects serving to magnify offensive intent. Threat and intimidation ruin the surprise.
Threat Sets Tactics in Stone
The tactics that any offensive strategy employs are subject to change based on the target’s response, actions, and unexpected intentions. The need to maintain a flexible tactical approach to any offensive plan is key in ensuring the offensive plan is completed to fruition.
Leading offensive initiatives with intimidation and threat narrows the breadth of tactical options for attack. The entity executing the offensive strategy is obliged to follow a certain set of tactical steps when their hand is exposed through legitimate threat and intimidation. Flexibility of a potential attack decreases along with the element of surprise ceasing to exist.
Threat and intimidation are counterproductive when the offensive entity is serious and legitimate in its goal to inflict damage. Those who veer away from advertising their intent to inflict damage keep their options of timing, tactics, and context open to their advantage.
Threat Diminishes the Legitimacy of an Upcoming Attack
When an offensive party advertises its intent to inflict damage, it broadcasts the intended seriousness of what will take place. That act of advertising how legitimate a threat one poses is a wasteful exercise because it does not aid an offense achieving success in any tactical way.
Only after a target has been secured or a window for response has been closed should an offensive entity go public about their intentions. The defensive party is gifted with time to think of counter-attacks, getaway strategies, and other defensive acts when intimidation and threat prefaces an attack.
Threats and intimidation thereby make implementing an attack more difficult because valuable information is volunteered for very little or no return. The threatening intimidator pays a high price for little reward.
Threat Does Not Dissuade Attack / Counter-Attack
While threats or intimidation are performed with the goal of ensuring the defense is less eager to squander their energy and resources in fighting back, the opposite effect is often achieved.
Rather than intimidating anyone into submission, threatening individuals paint a target on their back for the foreseeable future. Any threats made are remembered and noted even if the threats have not yet been actioned. Threats follow those spewing them into the future – even when they’ve managed to calm down and reconsider things. The threatening individual invites counter-attacks to strike when they expect it least because of threats they’ve administered in an uncorralled state.
Intimidation and threat thereby taxes the individual(s) who conjure(s) them. Such taxes to this behavior are paid in macro time-frames; payment often due when those who spewed threats prior least want to pay for what they’ve said.